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From: rowe@excc.exeter.ac.uk (John Rowe)
Subject: Re: Why you should not use Tcl
In-Reply-To: grante@reddwarf.rosemount.com's message of Thu, 29 Sep 1994 04:57:21 GMT
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Date: Thu, 29 Sep 1994 15:15:59 GMT
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   Darin Johnson (djohnson@seuss.ucsd.edu) wrote: 

> ouster@tcl.eng.sun.com (John Ousterhout) writes:

>> If Tcl makes people more productive then they will use
>> it;  when some other language comes along that is better (or if it is
>> here already), then people will switch to that language.  This is The
>> Law, and it is good.

> This sort of begs the issue that The Law is theoretical only and does
> not match actual practice.  For instance, an obvious corollary is that
> The Law applies to operating systems, yet the feet voted for MSDOS.

??????????

Yes, it's always easier to pick on something your opponent didn't
say and show it's false isn't it.

For the overwhelming majority of computer buyers the most important
question is "Will it run the applications I want to run?" And the most
important question for vendors deciding whether to port their product
is "how many people have, or shortly will have, this type of machine?".
Thus, once PC/MSDOS got on a roll most people were locked in.

Whereas with programming languages it's much easier to change. For
example, all my users' programs are written in Fortran (childish
comments to /dev/null please) but that doesn't stop me from writing
most of my stuff in C or Perl.

Programmers are free to use as many languages as they please. Most OS
users aren't.

John
